She squints against the sunlight, shoves her hands into her pockets and marches onto the road. She ignores the traffic streaming past and her teenage son Vivian who’s busy pulling faces.

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Rakhi Sahi

She squints against the sunlight, shoves her hands into her pockets and marches onto the road. She ignores the traffic streaming past and her teenage son Vivian who’s busy pulling faces. Instead, Central Reserve Police Force Commandant Rakhi Sahi, 43, looks into the camera, flashes a grin and says, “Should we stop the traffic? That’s our job after all.” In a few days, Sahi will be off to Liberia, a nation wrought with civil war. She will command an Indian contingent of 125 women, part of the Female Formed Police Unit under the UN Peacekeeping Mission. It’s the second of its kind to be sent from India. This will also be a new adventure for Sahi, who has, in her 20 years with the CRPF, worked in places like Punjab, Kashmir, and even Haiti. The need to do something different saw this Shillong girl give up her MPhil in Geography and join the paramilitary forces.

During her first posting in Punjab, she remembers being part of a combing operation in a village. “As we were leaving, a villager asked us to come up to her house for tea. We’d turned their homes upside down, forced them to stand in the cold for four hours, and yet there was so much compassion in that woman,” she says. It’s this lesson that she carries with her to Liberia. And Sahi hopes that while there, she will be able to diversify into community policing. Her husband too is a commandant in the CRPF. But the biggest challenge, she says, will be to survive a year without her best buddy Vivian. “He’s my friend and my main critic at home. I will really miss him,” she says.

“He isn’t dignified and is an unworthy president.”

Cecilia Sarkozy on French President and former husband, Nicolas Sarkozy in a yet-tobe-published biography by Anna Biton.

PROVING A POINT

Vani Tripathi

She grew up in Delhi, became a faculty member at the National School of Drama at 19, and added films like Chalte Chalte and Dushman to her portfolio.

But Vani Tripathi, 28, is still raring to go. She quit television two years ago and is out to prove her might with a documentary on farmer suicides in the Vidarbha and Marathwada regions of Maharashtra.

Also the national secretary of the Bhartiya Janta Yuva Morcha, Tripathi spent a year with members of the women farmers’ activist organisation, who move from village to village talking to distressed farmers about the options available. “For 10 years nobody heard their voices. I want them to be heard through this documentary,” she adds. This is a self-sponsored endeavour. “I don’t want anyone else to take credit,” she adds.

BRAIN TALK

Shubha Tole

Neuroscientist Shubha Tole, 40, has achieved the pinnacle of scientific success by publishing a paper in Science, a leading journal in this field. Tole, who has a PhD from Caltech University, US, is now part of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. She talks to Deepika Khatri about her work on the cerebral cortex, the most complex structure of the brain.

The project: Understanding how a machine is built is important in order to repair it, if it develops faults. This work, about a gene Lhx2, which decides the formation of the cerebral cortex in the embryo, will help us understand what goes wrong in brain disorders like autism and schizophrenia.

Challenges she faces as a scientist: Having the courage to take on high-risk experiments, to be open to criticism, secure enough to seek help where appropriate and have the tenacity to follow through or the courage to change course. Scientists don’t work in isolation, but need to find or attract research students, so that they give you the best of their abilities.

Future plans: I want to share the excitement of what I do through public outreach. I did a workshop for students using a game I designed with ribbons acting as wires. We connected students in a class as if they were part of the circuit diagram of the visual and motor system. Work is thrilling for me and I want students to enjoy science beyond books and diagrams.

SPICES OF TRADITION

Sucharita Reddy

She grew up in a traditional Telangana family, where every meal was prepared in an organised setting. This is where 70-year-old Sucharita Reddy’s love for food was born. Her book Nostalgia Cuisine is an amalgamation of traditional Andhra recipes for specific seasons.

Its target audience is the next generation, charged, she says, with keeping our traditions and lifestyles alive. The bounty of the season, she says, determines the variations in cuisine. Here Reddy shares one of the season’s favourites, a sneak preview from her book.

Amal Allana

Fifteen years ago while researching 19th century theatre, director and National School of Drama chairperson Amal Allana came across Aamar Katha, an autobiography by Bengali actor Binodini Dasi, who left her life as a courtesan and became a stage actor in Kolkata. It was a story that caught Allana’s imagination. Binodini acted for 12 years and by the time she was 25, her career had collapsed. “In that short span, Binodini had lived her life so intently, both as a woman and as an actor. I was enamoured by her life and knew that one day I would do it as a play,” Allana says. Staged at the recently-concluded NSD’s theatre festival, the play Nati Binodini has seen critical appreciation. It doesn’t stick to the three-act norm, nor is it a mere narration of events. The play is Binodini’s journey. And the actors, including the five who portray different stages of Binodini’s life, worked on it for two years before it was staged. “We were taking actual history and turning it into fiction,” says Allana. “It was going to be our creation, but at the same time we didn’t want it to be so different that people couldn’t relate to it,” she says.

LYRICS OF RESISTANCE

Vidya Shah

For 36-year-old musician Vidya Shah, coming out with the album Hum Sab- Celebrating Cultures of Resistance is where her love for music meets her calling for social issues and interest in advocacy. She tells Deepika Khatri about how it came about.

How is Hum Sab relevant now?

The 80s and 90s saw a lot of political rallies and movements. The poetry of those words is still alive today in the restlessness of the youth and their struggle for change. This album gives a new tune to those lyrics of resistance. I want it to permeate people’s consciousness, even if they are just humming to the music and don’t immediately grasp the lyrics.

Where did the inspiration for the album come?

I spent a year in Jhabua, a tribal district of Madhya Pradesh in the mid 90s, working with women and children and documenting their oral tradition. It made me introspective and I’ve wanted to put an album together ever since. The songs on this album draw from that experience, reflecting different cultures, whether it’s a song in Bhilali, Do Awazein for which Javed Akhtar wrote the lyrics or Ham Hain Iskey Maalik, written during the 1857 war of independence.